Abstract

“We assess and compare computer science skills among final-year computer science undergraduates (seniors) in four major economic and political powers that produce approximately half of the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics graduates in the world. We find that seniors in the United States substantially outperform seniors in China, India, and Russia by 0.76–0.88 SDs and score comparably with seniors in elite institutions in these countries. Seniors in elite institutions in the United States further outperform seniors in elite institutions in China, India, and Russia by 0.85 SDs. The skills advantage of the United States is not because it has a large proportion of high-scoring international students. Finally, males score consistently but only moderately higher (0.16–0.41 SDs) than females within all four countries.”

As JM distills it,

This study found that American computer science student greatly outperform those from India and China (the biggest source of H-1B). It also found that the average American student outperforms students in elite school in those countries. The talent is in the United States; in in India or China.
The very purpose of the H-1B program is to replace American workers with cheap, foreign labor. No other description of the program fits what Congress has enacted.
The line that H-1B is for high-skilled workers to fill jobs that Americans cannot fill is entirely spin that has no basis in the H-1B statutes. In 1998, Congress explicitly made it legal to replace Americans with H-1B workers.

UPDATED (7/2/019):

"This supposedly 'high-skilled' immigrant group–with a college or advanced degree–are scoring the same on standardized literacy tests as native-born Americans with just a high-school diploma" – Jason Richwine

“The U.S. government discriminates ‘against genius’ and ‘brilliance’ with its immigration system,” asserted President Trump, as he rolled out Jared Kushner’s immigration plan.

The president has insisted that “companies are moving offices to other countries because our immigration rules prevent them from retaining highly skilled and even … totally brilliant people.”

While it’s true that U.S. immigration policy selects for low moral character by rewarding unacceptable risk-taking and law-breaking—it’s incorrect to say that it doesn’t “create a clear path for top talent.”

Kibitzing about a shortage of talent-based immigration visas is just Mr. Kushner channeling the business and tech lobby’s interests.

No doubt, Big Business wants the “good” old days back. They currently operate in a labor market. They don’t like that, because, in a labor market, firms compete for workers and wages are bid up. Companies don’t like a labor market. They prefer that workers compete for jobs and wages not rise.

Multinationals, moreover, are stateless corporations. They are “global beasts with vast balance-sheets” and no particular affinity for American labor. But it’s not only about the Benjamins (to borrow from a U.S. congresswoman who, too, dislikes Americans).

The “men” who run multinationals are true believers. They are social justice warriors first; businessmen second. Tech traitors like the FAANG—Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google—are certainly radical leftists, who believe in replacing American labor as a creed and as a principle to live by.

Back to the talent-shortage myth. The 2017 IEEE-USA Employment Survey, which appears to be the latest from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, has some “bad news.” “The nearly two-thirds of U.S. IEEE members who reported being unemployed at some point during 2016, had not been re-employed by mid-April of 2017.” Hopefully, the updated report will be more upbeat.

Still, there is unemployment in the ranks of American electrical engineers. Yet for years, consumers of the H-1B visa (multinationals) have insisted they were bringing in the best and the brightest because America had too few, if any at all. Not true. The H-1B visa brings in ordinary workers to displace ordinary Americans, the kind the IEEE tracks.

Why doesn’t the president know that the H-1B visa category is a huge high-tech hoax, not a special visa for highly skilled individuals? It goes mostly to average workers. “Indian business-process outsourcing companies, which predominantly provide technology support to corporate back offices,” by the Economist’s accounting.

Overall, the work done by the H-1B intake does not require independent judgment, critical reasoning or higher-order thinking. “Average workers; ordinary talent doing ordinary work,” attest the experts who’ve been studying this intake for years. The master’s degree is the exception within the H-1B visa category.

While visa advocates—economist Stephen Moore, Trump’s adviser, is one—perpetuate the tall tale that the H-1B visa provides a steady supply of talent; visa opponents, for their part, like to cry croc about exploitation and slave-labor. I guess they think that misplaced compassion adds force to their arguments.

H-1B visa holders are not paid inferior wages. From the fact that an oversupply of high-tech workers has lowered wages for all techies, it does not follow that these (average) men and women are being exploited. Rather, it is the glut of average worker bees—their abundance—that has depressed wages for all. Which is just the way billionaire businessmen like it.

More significantly, and as this column has attempted to inform, since 2008, there is a visa category reserved exclusively for individuals with extraordinary abilities and achievement. It doesn’t displace ordinary Americans.

It’s the O-1 visa. There is no cap on the number of O-1 visa entrants allowed. …

In guarded language, the Washington State Office of Financial Management divulges that:

Migration continues to be the primary driver behind Washington [State’s] population growth. From 2017 to 2018, net migration (people moving in versus people moving out) to Washington totaled 83,700, … Net migration accounted for 71 percent of the state’s population growth this year, with natural increase (births minus deaths) responsible for the other 29 percent (33,600 persons). … The state has grown by an average of 87,900 persons per year this decade, exceeding that of 83,000 in the previous decade. King County is the main contributor, with total growth of 259,000 persons over eight years, compared to 194,200 persons between 2000 and 2010.

At least where I live, the town is unrecognizable. Costco is like a bazaar in Calcutta. What was a small and friendly town is flooded with Microsoft’s imported labor. I doubt the same people would like it if people speaking loud American English were to flood their stomping grounds back in the Old Country, making it unrecognizable.

Young people can’t afford homes to raise families, as replacement labor with Microsoft salaries—no, it’s not cheap labor AT ALL, unless you call 6-figure compensation “cheap”—pushes prices of property beyond the means of the local residents.

And then demographers complain that Americans aren’t reproducing.

Microsoft has thrown some money at the housing problem, allocating $500 million toward low-income housing because Americans who should be inching into the middle-class can’t afford homes in Seattle and, increasingly, in the surrounding counties.

Again, the reason, in part: the glut of labor Microsoft and other tech companies keep importing.

Adroitly, President Trump has optimized outcomes for the American Worker. His is a labor market like no other.

Long overdue in the U.S., a labor market is one in which firms compete for workers, rather than workers competing for jobs.

“For the first time since data began to be collected in 2000, there are more job openings than there are unemployed workers.” By the Economist’s telling (Jul 12th 2018), “Fully 5.8 million more Americans are in work than in December of 2015.”

Best of all, workers are happier than they’ve been for a long time.

Not so business. For American business, it’s never enough.

Big or small, business is focused on elephantine-like expansion.

Big and small, business is nattering about labor shortages: “Ninety percent of small businesses which are hiring or trying to hire workers report that there are few or no qualified applicants, according to the National Federation of Independent Business.”

With blaring headlines, the megaphones in the financial press are amplifying a message of dissatisfaction:

“The shortage is reaching a ‘critical point’ … A lack of applicants for blue-collar jobs such as trucking and construction has received particular scrutiny, as have states like Iowa where the unemployment rate is especially low (it is just 2.7 percent in the Hawkeye state).”

August 31 saw President Trump sign an executive order meant to further boost small businesses. These will be permitted “to band together to offer 401(k)s.”

Again, nice, but not enough. It never is. A businessman present piped up about “a very tight labor market … causing us a little bit of a problem.”

Contrast this gimme-more-forever-more attitude, with the patriotic perspective of your average Trump supporter: “I’m willing to take my lumps for the good of the country,” a farmer told broadcaster Laura Ingraham. “The Scottish in me says to the death.”

Look, a labor market allows wages to rise and productivity to grow, for unprofitable firms will soon fold when they find they can’t pay enough to attract workers. Scarce resources—labor and capital—are then “put to better use.” …